When a user scans a stack of documents using a scanner or the like, every page of each document is placed upside up for an ideal input. With the documents placed upside up, the user can read the documents easily, and scanned images of the documents can be read by the user without adjusting their directions. However in a practical application, the documents to be scanned by the user tend to be placed alternatively at angles of 0° (upside up) and 180° (upside down) as well as 90° and 270° (transversely). It would be burdensome and time-consuming for the user to check and adjust the placement directions of the documents page-by-page prior to their scanning. Therefore the scanner is designed with a function of judging automatically the direction of a document image. With the function of judging automatically the direction of a document image, the scanned document image can be adjusted to be placed upside up to thereby alleviate the burden on the user and improve the efficiency of usage by the user.
In a traditional method of judging automatically the direction of a document image, a text line in the document image is located; Optical Character Recognition (OCR) processing is performed respectively in four possible directions to obtain recognized characters and corresponding confidences or recognition distances thereof in the four possible directions; and the average confidence or the average recognition distance of the text line is calculated. The direction with the largest average confidence or the smallest average recognition distance is judged as the direction of the text line, and the direction of the document image is further judged from the direction of the text line. The direction of the text line refers to the upside-up direction of the text line, and the direction of the document image refers to the upside-up direction of the document image. Hereinafter, the character direction (or the direction of characters) refers to the upside-up direction of (the) characters.